Random things you may or may not have known about me.

('Cause I need blogfodder, and lack cat pictures.)

1. Although I have both a (half-) sister and a brother, I was raised as an only child. None of the three of us grew up together.
2. When I was a kid, I regularly would say I wanted 12 kids.  I've never wanted fewer than four.
3. For a pretty long portion of my childhood, I thought that the world itself had existed in black and white, because of the old photos.  I know one other person who also believed this as a child, but I won't out him/her, because I actually like him/her.
4. I used to own a cat named Tamale, who was brain-damaged because he walked into a fan at my dad's shop.  I also used to own a dog named Hamburger because someone had dragged him down the road behind their vehicle (whether on purpose or not we don't know) and that's what the poor thing's head looked like when we found him.  Other food-based pet names included French Fry and Dorito. (French Fry had a curly tail & Dorito was orange.)
5. I won third place in a short story contest in high school for a pretty overwrought piece of nonsense I dashed off in one night and turned in unedited.  I got nothing but bragging rights and a bound copy of all the contest entries for this dubious feat.
6. I had contacts at 16 and again at 28, but something was off with the prescription for the latter pair so I never wore them. I didn't go back & complain because I'm fairly certain it was my fault they were off.  I have a stupid amount of anxiety over the whole "Which is better, this one...or this one?" part of an eye exam.
7. I am becoming sorely tempted to hold my husband down and give him a buzz cut. Although I dig facial hair, long head hear gets to me for some reason.
8. It took me ten years to learn how to knit competently.  I want to learn how to spin, but all the directions I have read don't make sense to me.
9. I hate watching videos online, and generally won't click on anything longer than about 90 seconds.
10. As a kid I ate frog legs, rattlesnake, and crawfish with no problem, but as an adult the idea of any of those turns my stomach.  Similarly, I used to love bleu cheese but one night when I was around 20 or 21, I gagged on it and can't stomach it anymore.
11. On my own I sing alto, but I sing soprano when doing harmonies, or so I've been told. When we lived in Connecticut I was asked to be in the church choir, but I only went to one practice before chickening out. It wasn't singing in front of people that got to me, but practicing in a room full of strangers.
12.  I've been baptized twice, once in a Baptist church in Ohio and once in St Mark's Episcopal church here.  I have no clue why the re-dunking was done. The Baptist church did full immersion, in what to my five-year-old eyes seemed like a giant swimming pool. It was overly-chlorinated.  My cousin Shane told me to keep my eyes open when I went underwater 'cause it looked cool, so I did and it burned.  
13. Growing up, heavy metal was always just kind of there because this is San Antonio and you can't totally avoid it. I remember a family friend with a rather lurid (and, as an adult-looking-back, highly offensive) G'n'R t-shirt for the song "Sweet Child o' Mine", and my uncle listened to it some as well, but it was mostly country and southern rock in our house and country or oldies with my dad, so I never got into heavy metal.  So it wasn't until I got married the second time and had a second husband abruptly cease to want to listen to country music (and seriously what are the odds of that?) that I discovered how very much of that genre annoys the living fuck out of me.  Probably doesn't help that I want my metal to be truly heavy and Erik tends more toward the brainy/boring prog rock.
14. I can neither swim nor ride a bicycle. I had swimming lessons probably four or five times and never could get it down.  I cannot hold my breath for longer than about 10 seconds, which I think has something to do with it. When it comes to the bicycle thing, I was given a bike with training wheels as a child and no help actually figuring the damn thing out. I had no clue the training wheels were supposed to be uneven to teach me balance.  I actually care more about the bike thing than the swimming thing, and I'm fairly certain I've talked about both on this blog before, but I'm too damn lazy to look it up.
15. I have learned how to sew on a machine two or three times now, but it's not a skill I ever retain for very long. I don't know why this is.  I first learned in high school, where I took a re-named (I no longer recall to what) Home Ec, then taught myself again while pregnant with Bobbie.  I remain fairly handy at hand-sewing, though I have never been able to get my stitches properly even.